Love

Economist and author of the popular book ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy’, Shrayana Bhattacharya breaks down her findings on romantic desire and freedom, fantasising as a form of self-care and how the Bollywood superstar’s icon interacts with the socio-economic structures that define our deeply capitalistic notions of romantic love
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When Vanya Lochan thinks back to the time she felt the flicker of first love, she is transported to her school days, specifically to her one-sided infatuation with a 15-year-old classmate she reveals only as “M”. Now 25, the writer is learning how to make space for his friendship in the present as their old dynamic lurks in her subconscious (CW: Contains instances of fatphobia and internalised fatphobia)
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Taking inspiration from Kalidasa’s long poem ‘Ritusamhara’, in which specific elements of nature are personified as lovers, South-Goa-based Vivekananda uses the practice of psychic automatism to draw up feelings that live in the depths of their being, translating them into colours, patterns and bodies that come together in sensorial self-portraits. These multimedia works that represent the act of creating art are accompanied by the interdisciplinary artist’s poetic musings
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The ever-present questions about love and heartbreak confront three college-age friends catching up in a Kolkata cafe as the presence of Virginia Woolf looms large in this semi-autobiographical vignette
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Why is a woman’s worth relative to the vows of marriage? What makes a woman who has either transgressed or bypassed these vows for her own happiness so threatening to the status quo? Samhita Arni refers back to legendary figures — mythological and actual — and studies how history is being both repeated and revised in modern culture
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The thought of marriage awakens a conventional wedding fantasy from her childhood, but it is also a bitter reminder of her otherness as both a queer woman and a member of the BDSM community. In an honest appointment with herself, Jaya Sharma analyses these contrasting truths.
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